Lindsay Lohan’s father has blasted the actress for agreeing to star in a new movie about murderer Charles Manson.
more stories like thisHer dad Michael thinks his daughter – who will play Nancy Pitman, a cult follower of the notorious Manson who was convicted of seven counts of murder in 1971, in ‘Manson Girls’ – should stick to the “mainstream films” which made her a star.
He said: “I really hope that Lindsay gets back to the kinds of films that led to her success. I’d like to see her do more mainstream films.
“Some of the movies she has done recently were geared to a specific audience. But when you’re the kind of star Lindsay is, you have to appeal to a general audience, not just a specific audience.”
Manson was originally given the death penalty after masterminding a series of gruesome murders, including that of pregnant actress Sharon Tate, the then-wife of director Roman Polanski. His sentence was reduced after the state of California abolished the death penalty.
Although Lindsay’s character didn’t participate in the murders, she is believed to have accompanied Manson to the scene of the crime afterwards to help remove evidence.
The 21-year-old actress can next be seen starring alongside Jared Leto in ‘Chapter 27′ – a controversial new film documenting Beatles legend John Lennon’s assassination in 1980.
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AHA Recommendation
Omega-3 fatty acids benefit the heart of healthy people, and those at high risk of — or who have — cardiovascular disease.
We recommend eating fish (particularly fatty fish) at least two times a week. Fish is a good source of protein and doesn’t have the high saturated fat that fatty meat products do. Fatty fish like mackerel, lake trout, herring, sardines, albacore tuna and salmon are high in two kinds of omega-3 fatty acids, eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA).
To learn about omega-3 levels for different types of fish — as well as mercury levels, which can be a concern — see our Encyclopedia entry on Fish, Levels of Mercury and Omega-3 Fatty Acids.
We also recommend eating tofu and other forms of soybeans, canola, walnut and flaxseed, and their oils. These contain alpha-linolenic acid (LNA), which can become omega-3 fatty acid in the body. The extent of this modification is modest and controversial, however. More studies are needed to show a cause-and-effect relationship between alpha-linolenic acid and heart disease.
The table below is a good guide to use for consuming omega-3 fatty acids.
Summary of Recommendations for Omega-3 Fatty Acid Intake
Population Recommendation
Patients without documented coronary heart disease (CHD) Eat a variety of (preferably fatty) fish at least twice a week. Include oils and foods rich in alpha-linolenic acid (flaxseed, canola and soybean oils; flaxseed and walnuts).
Patients with documented CHD Consume about 1 g of EPA+DHA per day, preferably from fatty fish. EPA+DHA in capsule form could be considered in consultation with the physician.
Patients who need to lower triglycerides 2 to 4 grams of EPA+DHA per day provided as capsules under a physician’s care.
Patients taking more than 3 grams of omega-3 fatty acids from capsules should do so only under a physician’s care. High intakes could cause excessive bleeding in some people.
Background
In 1996 the American Heart Association released its Science Advisory, “Fish Consumption, Fish Oil, Lipids and Coronary Heart Disease.” Since then important new findings have been reported about the benefits of omega-3 fatty acids on cardiovascular disease. These include evidence from randomized, controlled clinical trials. New information has emerged about how omega-3 fatty acids affect heart function (including antiarrhythmic effects), hemodynamics (cardiac mechanics) and arterial endothelial function. These findings are outlined in our November 2002 Scientific Statement, “Fish Consumption, Fish Oil, Omega-3 Fatty Acids and Cardiovascular Disease.”
The ways that omega-3 fatty acids reduce CVD risk are still being studied. However, research has shown that they
decrease risk of arrhythmias, which can lead to sudden cardiac death
decrease triglyceride levels
decrease growth rate of atherosclerotic plaque
lower blood pressure (slightly)
What do epidemiological and observational studies show?
Epidemiologic and clinical trials have shown that omega-3 fatty acids reduce CVD incidence. Large-scale epidemiologic studies suggest that people at risk for coronary heart disease benefit from consuming omega-3 fatty acids from plants and marine sources.
The ideal amount to take isn’t clear. Evidence from prospective secondary prevention studies suggests that taking EPA+DHA ranging from 0.5 to 1.8 grams per day (either as fatty fish or supplements) significantly reduces deaths from heart disease and all causes. For alpha-linolenic acid, a total intake of 1.5–3 grams per day seems beneficial.
Randomized clinical trials have shown that omega-3 fatty acid supplements can reduce cardiovascular events (death, non-fatal heart attacks, non-fatal strokes). They can also slow the progression of atherosclerosis in coronary patients. However, more studies are needed to confirm and further define the health benefits of omega-3 fatty acid supplements for preventing a first or subsequent cardiovascular event. For example, placebo-controlled, double-blind, randomized clinical trials are needed to document the safety and efficacy of omega-3 fatty acid supplements in high-risk patients (those with type 2 diabetes, dyslipidemia, hypertension and smokers) and coronary patients on drug therapy. Mechanistic studies on their apparent effects on sudden death also are needed.
Increasing omega-3 fatty acid intake through foods is preferable. However, coronary artery disease patients may not be able to get enough omega-3 by diet alone. These people may want to talk to their doctor about taking a supplement. Supplements also could help people with high triglycerides, who need even larger doses. The availability of high-quality omega-3 fatty acid supplements, free of contaminants, is an important prerequisite to their use.
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IT’S been the most talked about global airport security debacle recently, and the woman who was forced to remove her nipple rings with pliers has made readers cranky.
Texas woman Mandi Hamlin was forced to remove her nipple rings by airport security guards in Lubbock, Texas, after the US national security transport body, the Transport Security Administration, failed to have a specific policy about body jewellery in place.
The TSA recently issued a public apology to Ms Hamlin, after she went public with a press conference where she told of how humiliated she was after her nipple rings were brutally removed.
The TSA then outlined its changes to the screening of passengers with body piercings in the future.
Read more about the apology and policy changes here.
Then read about how Ms Hamlin took on the TSA with her candid press conference.
Bloggers across the internet have shown most readers believe the incident was over the top, and violated Ms Hamlin’s right to privacy.
Some have gone to the point of saying Ms Hamlin was treated unfairly like a ‘terrorist’.
Other believe Ms Hamlin is entitled to compensation for her traumatic experience.
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The California Department of Justice (”DOJ”) has developed an automated background check process
that requires digitized fingerprints, called LIVESCAN. LIVESCAN is an inkless fingerprinting process.The
fingerprints are electronically transmitted to the central computers at the DOJ and/or FBI in a matter of
seconds,instead of the days required to send hard copy fingerprint cards through the mail.
ADVANCED LIVE SCAN has mobile fingerprint services.If you are an employer or a school that has a
need for your applicants or students to be fingerprinted for their job or License, contact ADVANCED LIVE
SCAN by phone or e-mail to schedule a visit from our MOBILE LIVE SCAN SERVICE. Why wait for weeks,
when we can come to you.
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The news is grim. Home values are dropping, the subprime mortgage mess is spreading, the stock market’s uncertain, and the economy seems to be heading into a recession.
No wonder plenty of us are worried.
Still, you can protect yourself. Here are some experts’ top five strategies to do your best in this choppy economy.
No. 1: Don’t panic
Stock-market gyrations can give even the hardiest investors a case of the jitters.
However, converting all your investments to cash is likely to do far more harm than good, says Joe Baker, a certified financial planner and president of Alcus Financial in Mount Pleasant, S.C.
“People are scared,” he says. “They’re asking, ‘Is the economy crashing? Should I move my 401(k) to a money market?’”
Baker answers: “Please do not, unless you need the cash tomorrow. You’d be making a huge mistake.”
Unless you need the money soon — say, within two years — it’s best to remind yourself that good and bad times pass. Historically, the market’s made up its losses fairly quickly.
Since 1945, there have been 11 recessions as defined by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index ($INX) — the index of widely held stocks used as a barometer for the overall market — generally has hit bottom six months into the typical 10-month recession, according to Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at Standard & Poor’s.
Top Stocks blog
After that point, the market typically starts to regain its footing. If you include the very worst meltdown, when the S&P 500 lost more than 45% of its value, it took 19 months for investors to recoup their losses. But exclude the huge losses, and you find that it’s actually taken just eight months, on average, for the index to bounce back.
“The reason the market peaks before recessions start and troughs before they’re finished is that investors are anticipators,” says Stovall. They’re willing to become more optimistic once the bad news is out,” he says.
Stovall’s advice to today’s worrywarts is direct: “Don’t freak out.”
No. 2: Bulletproof your portfolio
Sure, we all know the warning about putting our eggs in one basket. But when it comes to investing, too few heed this advice.
One study by Hewitt Associates, for example, found that three of five workers participating in a 401(k) plan never rebalanced their portfolios between 2000 and 2004. Failing to rebalance causes your portfolio to skew over time, leaving you overloaded with one kind of asset while owning too little of something else.
Learning Center: We explain investing basics
Economic indicators of a recession
Your 5-minute guide to home loans
15 signs of serious debt trouble
Your 5-minute guide to managing debt
Is being broke normal?
If you’ve neglected your assets, such imbalance could put you at greater risk.
Recent drops have left many investors in a position where they need more equities and less fixed-income. That may come as a shock to safety-hungry investors eager to stock up on fixed-income, cash and other “safe” assets.
“If your asset allocation was good for you six months ago, it should be good for you today,” says Ellen Rinaldi, executive director of investment planning and research at Vanguard. “The fact that the market is volatile should remind you to be appropriately diversified.”
Are we in a recession? Perhaps, but let’s not get hung up on semantics, says MSN Money’s Jim Jubak. The reality is that the economy is in a cyclical downturn that will take time to unwind.Personal factors like age and risk tolerance — not the current state of the economy — should drive your investing. For example, workers in their 20s and 30s should have roughly 80% to 90% of their assets in equities, while people in their 60s approaching retirement may devote up to 50% of their assets to stocks.
“Use market declines as opportunities to add to holdings,” says Stovall.
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Some experts warn that it’s a mistake to put your faith in gold, commodities or any other asset that seems popular now that the stock market is roiling.
“If you liked the market four months ago, it’s at a 15% discount,” says Brett Horowitz, a financial planner at Evensky & Katz. “It’s a great time to buy. When you buy at a point when everything looks ugly, that’s good. You’re buying low. It’s forward thinking.”
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JAKARTA, March 31 (Reuters) – Two Indonesian youths have died from bird flu, a health ministry official said on Monday, taking the confirmed death toll in the country worst affected by the virus to 107.
A 15-year-old boy from Subang, in West Java, died on Wednesday in an area where chickens had died, said Nyoman Kandun, director general of communicable disease control at the ministry.
An 11-year-old girl from Bekasi, east of Jakarta, who died on Friday also tested positive for the virus, the official said.
“There were dead chickens in the boy’s neighbourhood, but in the girl’s case it is still unclear,” Kandun said via a mobile phone text message.
Kandun dismissed the possibility of more bird flu cases in the same family after the boy’s brother died recently. Confirmed cluster cases raise concerns over human-to-human transmission.
“It is not correct that there is a cluster in Subang,” Kandun said, adding that the brother has died of dengue fever.
Earlier on Monday, a 22-month-old girl from Sumatra’s Bukit Tinggi tested positive for bird flu and the health ministry was checking her neighbourhood for possible backyard farming.
“Her condition is improving, and she is being treated at a Padang hospital,” Lily Sulistyowati, a health ministry spokeswoman, said by telephone.
Including the latest deaths, Indonesia has had 132 confirmed cases of the virus.
Contact with sick fowl is the most common way of contracting the H5N1 virus, which is endemic in bird populations in most of Indonesia.
According to United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) data on March 19, bird flu has infected 31 out of 33 provinces in Indonesia.
Experts say the danger is the virus may evolve into a form that people can easily catch and pass to one another, in which case the transmission rate would soar, causing a pandemic in which millions of people could die. (Reporting by Mita Valina Liem; Editing by Ed Davies and Alex Richardson)
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CHICAGO -(Dow Jones)- A proposed Merck & Co. (MRK) drug helped people lose more weight than those not taking the drug, but was linked to higher rates of certain psychiatric events.
The proposed drug, taranabant, is similar to Sanofi Aventis SA’s (SNY) rimonabant, which was rejected by a Food and Drug Administration panel last year over concerns about suicidal thoughts and behaviors. Sanofi later pulled the application from the FDA and sells the product under the brand name Acomplia in Europe and some South American countries.
Merck released the first set of Phase III data involving taranabant at the American College of Cardiology’s annual meeting here. The study followed patients for a year and involved a two-, four- or six-milligram dose of the drug as well as placebo group or patients who received a fake drug.
The Whitehouse Station, N.J., firm already announced that it didn’t plan to move forward with the four- and six-milligram doses of the drugs largely because of similar psychiatric side effects that so far have hampered approval of rimonabant in the U.S.
A data-safety monitoring board overseeing Merck’s two-year study recommended stopping the six-milligram dose of the study because it had a higher rate of psychiatric side effects and wasn’t much better at cutting weight than patients on a four-milligram dose.
Merck decided to scrap both the six- and four-milligram doses but is moving forward developing doses at two milligrams and lower.
Both taranabant and rimonabant are designed to help block a chemical in the endocannabinoid system, a physiological system in the body believed to play a role in how the body regulates food intake. However, the FDA has expressed concerns that blocking the same chemical could increase the risk for other problems, including mood disorders and neurodegenerative disorders such as multiple sclerosis.
The study involved about 2,500 patients considered obese or overweight who had risk factors for developing cardiovascular disease or diabetes such as high blood pressure or higher than normal blood-sugar levels.
About 400 patients each were in the placebo group and in the two- and four- milligram groups. About 1,200 patients were in the six-milligram group. Patients in all treatment groups also were placed on a diet and exercise regimen in addition to therapy or placebo.
Patients on the two-milligram dose of taranabant lost an average of 14.5 pounds after taking the drug for a year compared to an average 5.7-pound loss for patients in the placebo group. The study also showed that more than two times as many patients treated on the two-milligram dose, or 231 patients, lost 5% of their baseline body weight compared with 113 patients on placebo, and that three times as many patients had more than 10% weight loss after a year compared to the placebo group. Doctors consider a 5% or 10% total weight loss to be medically significant.
Overall, the study showed that 28.4% of patients in the two-milligram taranabant group reported some type of psychiatric event, compared with 20.3% in the placebo group. However, there were no reports of suicides, suicide attempts or thoughts about suicide in either the placebo, two- or four-milligram taranabant groups. Slightly more patients in the two-milligram group reported depression than those on the placebo group, while there was a statistically significant difference in reports of irritability among patients taking two- milligrams of taranabant compared to placebo.
John Amatruda, a vice president of clinical research at Merck Research Laboratories, said he was confident the company would continue collecting additional clinical data and would be able to present a “rich” dataset to the FDA when it seeks approval for taranabant.
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New research has revealed that mobile phones are more injurious to people’s health than smoking. Why is that? It seems that mobile phone usage and brain cancer are linked to each other.
According to one of the world’s top neurosurgeons, British Vini Khurana, using mobile phones for 10 years could double the risk of brain cancer. “This danger has far broader public-health ramifications than asbestos and smoking,” he told the Independent of London.
Dr. Khurana based his assessment on the fact that three billion people now use the phones worldwide, which is three times higher than people who smoke. Smoking kills some five million globally each year.
Dr. Khurana reviewed more than 100 previous studies on the effects of mobile handsets and concluded people should avoid using cell phones whenever possible and called on governments and industry to take “immediate steps” to reduce radiation exposure through the devices.
“In the years 2008-2012, we will have reached the appropriate length of follow-up time to begin to definitively observe the impact of this global technology on brain tumor incidence rates,” he said.
The French government has already warned against mobile phone use, particularly by children. Also, Germany and the European Environment Agency have urged its people to minimize their exposure to mobile handsets.
The Mobile Operators Association, last week, rejected Dr. Khurana’s study as “a selective discussion of scientific literature by one individual.” It “does not present a balanced analysis” of the published science, and “reaches opposite conclusions to the World Health Organization and more than 30 other independent expert scientific reviews.”
Dr. Khurana posted his analysis on a neurosurgery Web site and a paper about his research is currently under peer review for publication in a leading scientific journal.
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Yahoo has launched a niche site aimed at women called Yahoo Shine that features a mix of original blog content, articles, and videos with the help of content partners such as Glamour and Good Housekeeping magazine. Yahoo says Shine won’t be anything like your mother’s Web site that may have featured lean meatloaf recipes and celebrity gossip.
Shine says it is not attempting to reach the usual women Web site demographic of a “32.5 year-old with 2.2 kids” most women Web sites pander to. Rather the Ladies of Shine proclaim women today “no longer need to stand by passively as the media portrays us as fashion-obsessed diet victims.” To that end Yahoo Shine is an attempt at being a “smart, dynamic place for women to gather, get info and to connect with each other and the world around them.” Sounds like a pretty generic description to me.
Shine features some boilerplate women’s content sections including ones on fashion and beauty tips, a section dedicated to healthy living, and a love and sex section. Topics, at least today include future tech trends such as robot sex slaves, a story that asks whether comedian Tina Fey’s character on the NBC comedy 30 Rock is the new Mary Tyler Moore, and a story that explores the return of “adolescent fashion nightmares.”
The site faces a crowded online landscape of recent entrants including WOWOWOW (backed by Whoopi Goldberg, Peggy Noonan, Lily Tomlin, and Candice Bergen) and Sk*rt, a kind of “Digg for Chicks” others have called it. Of course there are longtime women sites such as IVillage.
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The trickle of Democratic superdelegates declaring for Barack Obama is turning into more of a gusher, fast closing Hillary Clinton’s one lead in the nomination race and ratcheting up pressure on her to defend her candidacy.
Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota is announcing her support this morning. The Wall Street Journal reported today that all seven Democratic US House members from North Carolina plan to come out for Obama in one fell swoop before that state’s May 6 primary.
“The Democratic Party is blessed this year with two candidates with many excellent leadership qualities, and I believe each of them would be a strong president. I am endorsing Barack Obama today, because he has inspired an enthusiasm and idealism that we have not seen in this country in a long time,” Klobuchar said in a statement issued by the Obama campaign.
“I am endorsing Barack because he is a new kind of leader — speaking with a different voice, bringing a new perspective and inspiring a real excitement from the American people. He is able to dissolve the hard cynical edge that has dominated our politics under the Bush Administration. I believe Barack can unify the American people to address the many challenges facing our nation.”
She is the 64th superdelegate to endorse Obama since Super Tuesday on Feb. 5.
Obama, boasting a more than 6-1 edge in superdelegate endorsements since Super Tuesday, is quickly catching up to Clinton in that count. He already leads in overall delegates and popular vote heading into the next contest, the April 22 primary in Pennsylvania. The 795 superdelegates — elected officials, party leaders, and others — are likely to decide the nominee because neither Clinton nor Obama appear likely to reach the clinching number just from those delegates awarded by primaries and caucuses.
Clinton, who along with Obama is campaigning today in Pennsylvania, stressed several times over the weekend that she has no plans to drop out and may indeed take the fight all the way to the national convention in late August.
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